Environmental Stewardship in Aquaculture

Prior to the 1980s, aquaculture was seen as, at worst, a benign endeavor and, at its best, the soundest imaginable way to grow food. During the 1980s and 1990s, aquaculture sectors developed with the goal of producing higher-value products, often for export, and culture practices often had higher rates of resource use and greater environmental impacts than traditional aquaculture. Mistakes were made and some farms were poorly designed, poorly operated, or simply built in the wrong place. Aquaculturists learned quickly and improved performance—often stimulated by new regulations or marketplace blackmail from non-governmental organizations. Current efforts to improve performance seem obsessed with retailer sourcing policies and third-party certification systems. Those programs will not achieve the improvements needed by all agriculture sectors because fair and effective performance standards are difficult to formulate and current incentives to adopt standards are greatest for higher-value products grown for export. Future efforts should focus on critical stewardship practices that reduce impacts while simultaneously improving production performance and assuring economic sustainability. This effort will rely on voluntary adoption of those practices and can only be successful if producers are made aware of the impacts of their actions and how environmental stewardship and production efficiency are linked.